Biography

Scottish mathematician and author. He discovered a formula showing the relations and identities of structural forms invariant under transformation.

Forsyth was the son of an engineer in the Glasgow shipyards. When the family moved to Liverpool, young John began to show his exceptional math abilities at secondary school. He entered Trinity College at Cambridge in 1877 and graduated in 1881. Placing first in the ranked list of grads, he was appointed to a fellowship at Trinity where his thesis proved deep results on double theta function. Forsyth’s remarkable talent took him to an appointment to a chair of mathematics at the University of Liverpool at age 24.

In 1884, he took a lectureship at Cambridge and two years later, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 1893 he published "Theory of Functions of a complex variable" which had such an impact at Cambridge that function theory dominated there for many years, having a greater influence on British mathematics than any work since Newton's Principia.

Forsyth was appointed to the chair of Pure Mathematics in 1895 at Cambridge where he remained until 1910. He was forced to resign his chair that year due to a scandal caused by his love affair with a married woman, Marion Amelia Boys. After her divorce, the couple married and spent some time in Calcutta before he eventually found another post in England, being appointed to the chair in Imperial College London in 1913. He retired from his chair in London in 1923 when reaching the age of sixty-five but continued to publish mathematical texts until he was close to eighty years of age.